off topic: I'm the type of person who likes to select text while reading, and this page is terrible for that. It seems to replace the select cursor icon with a highlighter icon, which is super jarring. It also adds a weird popup after you selected text.
Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce
181–190 of 689 posts
Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce
#182Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
The company is nowhere near failing. It's just not necessary to be as big as it is. Dropbox still has the best sync technology by far, however they failed to really capitalize on a single market. The consumer side cares more about value and it's hard to compete with Microsoft/Apple/Google while the business side is already well-served by Box.com. I still think there's a good opportunity if they can build on storage t…
I can't talk about GDrive or iCloud. However, window's cloud storage is REALLY good. Far better than dropbox IMO. It actually surprised me how seamless it worked on my new laptop. Everything just worked out of the box, the only thing I had to do was provide my windows credentials (benefits of that sort of integration). That being said, I've not tried to access those same files from my phone. Maybe that's worse. Dropb…
> window's cloud storage is REALLY good. Far better than dropbox IMO.
That's "thanks" to Dropbox though. Microsoft's "Live" features used to be terrible. It took a competitor to show them how it's done and force them to step up their game.
Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce
#184Keep on thinking of Steve Jobs saying companies like these are features not products
Hmm can you share more about this? It makes sense on the surface but it would be great to know what the context was.
> In 2009, Steve Jobs wanted to pay more than a hundred million dollars for Dropbox. As Houston later told Forbes’ Victoria Barret, when he politely turned down his hero’s offer, Jobs declared that Dropbox was a feature, not a product. Jobs was right: To do what we all want it to do, syncing has to be baked in to all the gadgets we use today. OS companies are warming to that notion—and they don’t need Dropbox to do it.
https://pando.com/2012/02/26/steve-jobs-was-right-dropbox-is...
Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce
#185"6 months of COBRA" presumably means Dropbox will pay 6 months of COBRA premiums for departed team members? COBRA has a statutory duration much longer than 6 months.
They could have just said continued healthcare for 6 months - that's got to be a lot better than paying for 6 months of COBRA.
Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce
#186I have a couple connections on LinkedIn that work at Dropbox, and through them I have noticed a decent amount (certainly more than usual) of somewhat-high-up individuals leaving Dropbox in the past couple weeks. Might just be completely coincidental, but I wonder if they had advance notice (or perhaps just saw the writing on the wall)?
Also anecdotal and total speculation, I interviewed at Dropbox a couple years ago and they were making a big push into b2b Dropbox, particularly with Paper, but I've yet to really hear about them successfully breaking into that space (have never met or even heard of a company using Paper in the wild). Olivia (the COO that's also leaving) used to head up b2b functions at Google before joining Dropbox. I wonder if these layoffs are also from the b2b teams and perhaps Dropbox is pulling back from (or at least rethinking) those efforts?
Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce
#187Just venting on a semi-related note: Dropbox's web UI is atrocious. I have a side bar which won't go away with features I don't want. It's clunky, slow and endlessly frustrating. Viewing a PDF with something like a schematic is almost impossible unless I download it locally.
Just get the basics right before you upsell.
Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce
#188Keep on thinking of Steve Jobs saying companies like these are features not products
I sure hope not. Every vertical company wants my files locked in their walled garden, but I want my files to be horizontally portable. This is a fight where it's nice to have a $10B company in your corner.
Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce
#189This is interesting because having layoffs at a company that should be going off like a rocket during a pandemic is odd. What is going on at Dropbox that prevented them from taking advantage of the huge shift to remote work?
Why should they be going off like a rocket?
more people are working remotely which probably requires more people looking for ways to share files more efficiently.
Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce
#190you know what doesn’t get talked about: severence. why do we need it? why do employers give it? should one negotiate it? what is fair/unfair?
> why do we need it?
Because we don't have a social safety net in the United States, so getting laid off could make you instantly destitute.
> why do employers give it?
To maintain their community reputation. In the future when they hire again, it's easier to paper over a layoff if you can show that you tried to take care of the employees.
Also because it's the ethical thing to do.
> should one negotiate it?
Usually in a mass layoff like this you can't negotiate it, since it's a standard package and you don't really have any leverage. But if you're a one off "layoff" you can and probably should negotiate it. Your leverage is "I might sue you for wrongful termination". So the company has to make a calculus on what that might cost them.
> what is fair/unfair?
That's the 64,000 dollar question, isn't it? It seems like three months is pretty typical. When someone gets six months most people call them "lucky". When someone gets a year people call it "unheard of". No whether that's fair or not is anyone's guess.
It would be great to get some data on how long the average laid off tech worker is out of work. Maybe start a movement to get severance to match that. But again, the laid off employee has very little leverage.